Formal Reasoning about Physical Properties of Security Protocols

  • Authors:
  • David Basin;Srdjan Capkun;Patrick Schaller;Benedikt Schmidt

  • Affiliations:
  • ETH Zurich, Switzerland;ETH Zurich, Switzerland;ETH Zurich, Switzerland;ETH Zurich, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC)
  • Year:
  • 2011
  • The cyber-physical attacker

    SAFECOMP'12 Proceedings of the 2012 international conference on Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security

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Abstract

Traditional security protocols are mainly concerned with authentication and key establishment and rely on predistributed keys and properties of cryptographic operators. In contrast, new application areas are emerging that establish and rely on properties of the physical world. Examples include protocols for secure localization, distance bounding, and secure time synchronization. We present a formal model for modeling and reasoning about such physical security protocols. Our model extends standard, inductive, trace-based, symbolic approaches with a formalization of physical properties of the environment, namely communication, location, and time. In particular, communication is subject to physical constraints, for example, message transmission takes time determined by the communication medium used and the distance between nodes. All agents, including intruders, are subject to these constraints and this results in a distributed intruder with restricted, but more realistic, communication capabilities than those of the standard Dolev-Yao intruder. We have formalized our model in Isabelle/HOL and have used it to verify protocols for authenticated ranging, distance bounding, broadcast authentication based on delayed key disclosure, and time synchronization.